Facilitating Machinery-of-Government Changes

A recent federal election in my home country has reminded me of the disruption and work load on IT resources that can arise from organizational changes in governments and in complex enterprises. Inevitably a change in government leads to a reshuffle of the bureaucracy with new ministries, merging of departments, movement of functions between departments,changes of email domains, etc. This also happens within enterprises because of M&A activity and reorganisations.

The functionality required to reflect such restructurings (often referred to as “machinery of government”) can cause huge amounts of work, resulting in long delays before the changes are reflected in supporting IT systems. I have known of cases within government where it took many months of expensive hard work and continuing operating inefficiencies before the new structure was finally reflected in the enterprise directory which governed access to IT systems, email addresses, organisation charts, etc.

It staggers me that this “business” requirement is often not considered when selecting an enterprise directory, often because it is often overlooked by technical evaluators.

Machinery-of-government changes can be simplified (almost trivialised) by the utilisation of an enterprise directory whose structure reflects the “real-world” hierarchy of the government, and provides a simple “drag’n’drop” process to move elements from one agency to another. A matter of minutes rather than months. The enterprise’s new structure can be in place from “day 1” – the savings, operational efficiencies and user satisfaction can be enormous.

The enterprise Directory server from ViewDS Identity Solutions is one of the few (or only?) that can deliver this functionality. For further explanation of how it works, please refer to Machinery of Government White Paper.